What Is Sustainability?

and Bartle (2009) proposed a connection between public administration values and sustainability. Nijaki (2015) added social equity as one of the dimensions of sustainability.

What Is sustaInabIlIty? One of the earliest definitions of the term “sustainability” came from the Brundtland Commission, which defined sustainability as development that “meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (WCED 1987, p. 8). The ecological footprint is a resource management tool, which measures just how much land area and water human needs to produce the resources it consumes and to absorb its wastes under the present technology. The consumption of the resources and generation of waste is central to securing an understanding of sustainability.

Environmental sustainability includes three elements: human health and well-being; ecosystem vitality; and resource efficiency (Paehlke 2004, 2007). The initial environmental elements include clean air and water, sanitation, safe food and protection from harmful objects. The second element of environmental sustainability concerns ecosystem vitality, which includes protecting the habitat, protecting biodiversity, and the third element includes efficient sources of energy and water without serious damage to health and the ecosystem. In a similar classification, Sachs (1997) emphasized three imperatives of sustainability: economic development, the biophysical system, and development. According to another commentator, “Environment also is a multi-dimensional concept, incorporating physical geography like climate, geology, soils, and plants and animals, but also including the social environment and material culture of a given population. In some contexts, the environment is thought of as the natural, non-human world: what places would look like without human-caused changes” (Nelson 2016, p. 354).

Several authors regard the issue of sustainability from the perspective of social and financial systems. The concept is also concerned with ecological and environmental integrity. In a further contribution to the discussion, the United Nations Environmental Program Report (1998) emphasized the importance of people, planet, and profit. “Environmental sustainability refers to the impact of service delivery by public infrastructures on the urban population (health, well-being), urban environments (air quality, water quality, congestion), and the wider surroundings (ecological